Dusting Attacks - Reading Assignment

Privacy Coins - Ultimate Course
#41
1. What is the goal of a dusting attack?

To use the dusted addresses in an attempt to identify which wallet they belong to and then identify who owns that wallet.

2. If a dusting attack is successful, how is the victim at risk?
  • Loss of anonymity
  • May be targeted in a cyber extortion or phising attack
3. Do deterministic wallets protect against dusting attacks?

Deterministic wallets can protect against dusting attacks if new addresses are used for each receiving transaction. However, the danger remains if the dusting attack UTXOs are used as input for another transaction as this will link together other UTXOs that belong to the same wallet.

4. What features did Samourai Wallet add to protect against dusting attacks?

Samourai wallet implemented a “do not spend” flag for suspicious transactions to make sure the dust UTXOs don’t get spent.

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#42

The goal is to find out who the owner of funds is.

The attacker knows about the funds and can start pishing attacks or cyber-extortion (blackmailing the owner).

Yes, because they allow you to always use a new address.

The implemented a function to mark suspcicious UTXOs so that they will not be included in any transaction and thus are useless for the attackers.

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#43
  1. To create a very small transaction to a wallet in order to trace the eventual spending of that UTXO in order to deduce the owner of the wallet.
  2. Mostly by losing his anonymity.
  3. Not directly, although it helps to generate unique addresses for each transaction.
  4. They not only raise warnings when possible attempts are being made, but they allow you to “lock” UTXOs from being spent.
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#44

  1. What is the goal of a dusting attack?
    The endgoal of the dusting attack is to find out, who is the person/company behind a wallet.

  2. If a dusting attack is successful, how is the victim at risk?
    The victim would lose his/her anonymity, maybe without even knowing it. And maybe he/she could lose all the funds by a fishing attack or gets blackmailed.

  3. Do deterministic wallets protect against dusting attacks?
    No, because as soon as you move the funds the dusting attack is successful.

  4. What features did Samourai Wallet add to protect against dusting attacks?
    A real-time alert for dusting tracking and a “Do Not Spend” mark on strange funds.

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#45
  1. What is the goal of a dusting attack?
  • The goal is to de-anonymize users by tricking users to connect the dust to more bitcoin addresses and break the privacy of the user.
  1. If a dusting attack is successful, how is the victim at risk?
  • If an attacker knows the user’s identity he can extort or trick (phishing) the user.
  1. Do deterministic wallets protect against dusting attacks?
  • No, dusted funds are still trackable. Deterministic wallets will (usually) still spend money from several UTXOs.
  1. What features did Samourai Wallet add to protect against dusting attacks?
  • Samourai wallet implemented a “do not spend” feature, to prevent the wallet from using dust UTXO’s for new transactions.
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#46
  1. The goal of a dusting attack is to de-anonymize the owner of a wallet.
  2. A successful dusting attack will leave the owner vulnerable to phishing attacks or cyber-extortion threats.
  3. No, deterministic wallets do not protect against dusting attacks.
  4. Samourai wallet added transaction analysis to detect dusting and flag them as suspicious notifying the user. The user can also flag transactions with “Do not spend” as they also them find suspicious.
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#47

  1. What is the goal of a dusting attack?
    The goal of a dusting attack is to identify person(s) or companies behind wallets, by sending small amounts of currency - a few satoshis, for example - or dust, to addresses and then tracking said transactions.

  2. If a dusting attack is successful, how is the victim at risk?
    If successful, the victims of a dusting attack may compromise their identities, and subject themselves to potential phishing or cyber-extortion attacks.

  3. Do deterministic wallets protect against dusting attacks?
    No, since dusted funds will be tracked as soon as transactions are performed.

  4. What features did Samourai Wallet add to protect against dusting attacks?
    It gives warnings of dusting attacks and marks suspicious UTXOs so that the dusted transactions will not be spent, and therefore cannot be tracked.

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#48
  1. the goal is to give an identity/owner to anonymous wallets;

2.The identity of the victim could be revealed and phishing or blackmailing (exortion) could happen

  1. In principle no, however, if the wallet owner does not move the funds, the attack would fail;

  2. Samurai wallet has a feature where you can avoid to spend small deposits from unknown sources.

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#49
  1. Merging of wallet addresses with the purpose of deanonimizing those addresses because of their association; if merged those 2 addresses belong to the same wallet user.
  2. The user can be targeted for extortion or fishing attempts.
  3. In so far that if new addresses are generated for each new transaction, the amount of transaction history of the wallet that will be revealed after successful merging, is limited.
  4. Do not spend feature and notification of suspicious incoming transactions.
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#50
  1. What is the goal of a dusting attack?
  • To find out the true individual holding the address and further attack the account.
  1. If a dusting attack is successful, how is the victim at risk?
  • They may encounter phishing attack anf cyber-extortion threats.
  1. Do deterministic wallets protect against dusting attacks?
    Yes, every time using a new address can prevent dusting attacks.
  2. What features did Samourai Wallet add to protect against dusting attacks?
  • the wallet implemented a alert to exclude suspicious funds in future transactions.
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#51

  1. What is the goal of a dusting attack?
    finding dusting addresses that link to the wallets, or/and companies and people are behind these wallets

  2. If a dusting attack is successful, how is the victim at risk?
    Victim can be identify and trace their transactions

  3. Do deterministic wallets protect against dusting attacks?
    Not really, I think, because attacker will analysis dusting linked multi-transactions, not only based on addresses.

  4. What features did Samourai Wallet add to protect against dusting attacks?
    Warning automatically wallet’s owner, if there are suspicious transactions, the dusting transactions.

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#52
  • What is the goal of a dusting attack?
    to break the privacy of bitcoin and cryptocurrency users.
  • If a dusting attack is successful, how is the victim at risk?
    victim can be find on a living address and the address on the web by IP address for example, later on going after them with phising or knocking on the front door of their house.
  • Do deterministic wallets protect against dusting attacks?
    no, because the dusted funds send to your wallet still be traceable once you use them in another transaction.
  • What features did Samourai Wallet add to protect against dusting attacks?
    the Samourai wallet team implemented a real-time alert for dust tracking as well as a “Do not spend” featyre that let users mark suspicious funds, so these are not included in future transactions.
#53

  1. The goal of a dusting attack is to de-anonymize users by tracking utxos with miniscule amounts of btc that have been sent to a victims wallet by the attacker. The hope of the attacker is that users will ignore these small amounts and combine them with future utxos.

  2. The privacy of users is at risk. A user might send a transaction using a wallet that includes the dust when constuctiong the transaction, linking the users current transaction to the old one.

  3. No, becuse all transaction information is publicly available on the blockchain. Even though the Deterministic Wallet creates each transaction with a new receiving address, that address is, once broadcast, available publicly to all and an attacker could still send dust to it.

  4. They added a feature that alerts the user if suspicious dust-sized amount is received. The user can then mark that utxo as “do not spend”, avoiding it being mixed with other utxos in the future.

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#54

  • The goal of a dusting attack is to determine the identity of the user of affected wallets for scam reasons, reveal identity and so forth.

  • This can basically reveal your identity, thus be a victim of a phishing attack.

  • I would say yes, because even if they tracked the funds somehow, your still protected by the ECC factor (secure point).

  • The feature that a Samourai Wallet offers is to notify you of any dusting funds that you account might have and alert you not to spend them.

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#55

1.To de-anonymize user accounts by trying to identify which transactions belong to the same account

  1. The accounts used in the transactions will all be traced back to him and this will lead to other cyber attacks against the user

  2. No because once they send funds their addresses can be traced back to them

  3. It automatically reports any suspicious transactions to the user

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#56

  1. The goal is to establish a connection between the dusted address and other wallets which belongs or are related to the same owner (doesnt matter whether company or individual).

  2. The attacker could use some sort of cyber crime (phishing, cyber extortion) against the victim in order to get access to keys, because with the dusting attack the hacker may know that it is lucrative to get access to your accounts/wallets.

  3. I would say no, because the addresses are linked together. When the victim spend the dust the attacker could find out that the addresses are related to one person/account/entity.

  4. Samourai Wallet implemented a live alert for the detection of dust attacks as well as a feature which allows users to block/freeze these dust funds which are then not included in future transactions. Because of the dust freezing the attacker could not draw any conclusion which other address belong to the dusting attacked address.

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#57

Q1: The goal of a dust attack is to de anonymize the persons being attacked and create a connection between the “dust” and the account of the person(s) being attacked.

Q2: Cyber- extortion and blackmail are two of many possibilities

Q3: The most efficient way to prevent a dust attack is to monitor where all coins are coming from and like in Samouri’s case a DNS feature that marks suspicious funds to prevent you from accidentally exposing yourself.

Q4: The DNS feature that marked suspicious funds in order to stop someone from moving them to an address that could lead to exposure later on

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#58
  1. Spy on addresses to track down owners, after which they threaten to disclose information or make phishing attempts.
  2. See above.
  3. No, because if the dust is moved from one address to another, users can be tracked. A good way to avoid these Dusting Attacks is to warn users of possible suspicious funds (as Samourai Wallet did).
  4. Samourai Wallet has implemented a system that warns its customers of probable suspicious funds. For example, it introduced the “Do not spend” function, thanks to which it warns users not to spend those specific funds.
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#59

1 - What is the goal of a dusting attack?

The goal of dusting is to de-anonymize the address of the user, identifying the owner of the address.

2- If a dusting attack is successful, how is the victim at risk?

The victim’s privacy is at risk. After determining the identity of the victim, the attacker can blackmail the victim, sell victim’s identity, or conduct social engineering with the discovered identity.

3 - Do deterministic wallets protect against dusting attacks?

With a deterministic wallet the public key(owner address) can be changed after each transaction has been received. This address is not reused.

The following can be done to counter dusting:
- Use an off-chainlayer for transactions (Lightning).
- Use a VPN.
- Use an exchange to convert your crypto.
- Move funds from the dusty address to another wallet without the dust.
- Use “do not spend” feature of the wallet.

4- What features did Samourai Wallet add to protect against dusting attacks?

The Samourai Wallet has a “do not spend” feature, which provides the ability to mark transaction with minute, unknown deposits to not be included in further transactions.

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#60
  1. The goal is to track your bitcoin spending and link it to your identity to de anonymise you or through KYC.
  2. If dusting attack is successful the victim is at risk of cyber extortion or phishing attacks and government authority to notice legal and illegal transactions.
  3. I don’t think so because its a bitcoin wallet. :smile:
  4. Samourai Wallet used a coin control feature to help clients to manage dust attack.
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